Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Busy this morning

There was, the story goes, a pork-pie company over in England that was producing huge numbers of the things. Huge, that is, compared to their number of employees. In fact, on closer inspection, they were cranking out more pork pies than even seemed possible. This began to attract attention, and soon a team of managerial consultants had flown over from the US, eager to learn the secret.

"Do you have Pareto chart analysis?", they asked the owner of the firm. "No, no, nothing like that, he said. "Six-sigma black belt tiger teams?" asked another. "Speak English," said the owner, squinting at the consultant. "Multifactor quality control analysis, then?" came the next question, but that just got another impatient "No, no, never heard of it".

"Look now", said the factory owner, waving them all off, "I'll tell how things work here. Every so often, I just go over to that window there, the one that looks out over the floor, and I stick my head through, and I have a look around, and then I scream FASTER, YOU BASTAAAAARDS! And that's all there is to it."

Why - do you want them doing more of what they're doing? You might be better off offering free nap periods and lots of food - it's rewarding bad behavior, but it keeps them out of your hair.Eventually, you could probably release them into the wild while they're napping.

Our CEO once told me this exact joke, he is very fond of it - and it's not a good thing. It presents a picture of lab work as a pie-press stamping process. Maybe it applies to a work in analytical lab where they run 500+ samples of wastewater in a day.

I can't imagine he'd like the same treatment, though. If his work # and address were posted for his investors, I'm not sure he'd be thrilled to explain to them why they need an expensive CEO to yell at people when they could get one of the many ex-military people with a gun, a loud voice, and a hatred for employees to do it much more cheaply.

I used to work in a pork pie factory on the south coast of England in university holidays, and that certainly sounds like the kind of language I heard there, a bit tame even. Not sure how effective the approach would have been where I worked though as most of the production holdups were caused by problems with the machines. The stoppages were a great chance to practice drawing organic chemistry reaction mechanisms in the grease on the side of the machine though!